Diana Joseph develops and studies learning environments that honor the interests of learners in urban schools. Concern about learner interest led her from teaching education-through-the arts projects in neighborhood schools to Northwestern University's Learning Sciences Program, where she completed her PhD in June of 2000. Her dissertation, Passion as a Driver for Learning: A Framework for the Design of Interest-Centered Curricula reports on an extended development process using design experimentation techniques . She designed and taught a prototype interest-centered curriculum, known as the "Video Crew" over several design cycles. This work has so far produced a set of curricular mechanisms that embody principles derived from motivation research and from learning environment design theory, a realized prototype curriculum, strategies for examining learner motivations, and rich case studies of student trajectories in passion curricula. Currently, Joseph collaborates with elementary school teachers to make the framework more available to other teachers and designers. Joseph is lead researcher and program developer for the technology integration at the Center for School Improvement at the University of Chicago.